Michael Cohen-Weissert

Michael Cohen-Weissert is a pianist, composer, and conductor. He was born in Jerusalem in 1993 and moved to Berlin in 2008, where he has established himself and is currently based. He has a diverse career, performing as a soloist and conductor with orchestras such as the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano, and Norddeutsche Philharmonie Rostock, as well as being a sought-after chamber musician, playing with musicians such as Claudio Bohorquez, Jens-Peter Maintz, Mate Szücs, Mark Bouchkov, and Nur Ben-Shalom amongst others.

As a composer and arranger, he collaborates closely with numerous musicians and projects, such as the project "Lebensmelodien", for which he has composed and arranged over 40 pieces inspired by melodies written between 1933 and 1945. Other musicians and ensembles who frequently play his music are Philharmonix, Tomoki Park, Markus Merkel, and Nimrod Ensemble. In 2018, his first opera, AMALIA!, was premiered in Bolzano.

Believing a modern artist must not only play but also organize, he founded the Charles Rosen-Ensemble, dedicated to the performance and promotion of contemporary music, and he is a co-artistic director at the festival Eole en Musiques in France. His piano teachers were Elena Lapitskaja, Jacques Rouvier, and Stefan Arnold. He also attended composition classes held by Elena Mendoza and Marc Sabat, as well as chamber music classes with teachers such as Artemis Quartet and Eberhard Felz. In addition to his studies, he attended masterclasses and worked with many different musicians such as Claude Frank, Bruno Rigutto, Aldo Ciccolini, Paul Badura-Skoda, and Peter Serkin.